In a managed information environment, users typically access a mass storage subsystem, such as one or more databases (DBs) for various data items used in the normal course of operations. Often, it is desirable to monitor and oversee transactions occurring with respect to data base access. Monitoring the databases access transactions can identify potential security breaches, inappropriate usage of sensitive information, track usage trends to assist with resource planning and accounting chargebacks, and provide continuous tracking of access to sensitive data for government mandated auditing and regulatory compliance.
In modern managed information environments, database security is a growing concern. With the increasing availability of computing power and mass storage, many corporations are maintaining larger data stores of sensitive or confidential information. Such information includes not only intrinsic proprietary corporate data, but also data external to the corporation, such as customer account information, names, addresses, credit card and bank account information, etc. At the same time, public awareness about privacy and the responsibility of entrusted entities to safeguard the information entrusted to them increases. Accordingly, database operators strive to maintain transaction monitoring, access control, and audit trail recording over such a database repository.
Database security and monitoring mechanisms can impose a substantial processing burden on the systems they monitor. Performance and throughput can be detrimentally affected by security mechanisms which intercede in every database access for security processing and transaction logging. However, nonintrusive database security mechanisms can mitigate this overhead. Nonintrusive database monitoring avoids burdening the database server with the transactional gathering associated with monitoring and controlling the database access attempts. Rather, the interception and collection of database access attempts (transactions) is offloaded to a separate computing device, or collector.
Accordingly, some systems employ nonintrusive data level database access monitoring techniques. Nonintrusive access monitoring resides in a separate computing device in communication with an access path, such as an Ethernet cable, between the users and the database server. Such nonintrusive devices observe database access requests (transactions) in a passive manner during transport from the user to the database server. Accordingly, a database monitor device passively intercepts these transactions in a nonintrusive manner from an access network, a technique sometimes referred to as “sniffing.” Accordingly, a database monitor and access control framework may gather the database transactional data via an offloaded processor which does not impede database access or compete with database servers for available CPU cycles.